Study documents early puberty onset in boys – “Pediatricians recorded the earliest stage of puberty as occurring in non-Hispanic white boys at age 10.14 years; in non-Hispanic African-American boy at age 9.14 years, and in Hispanic boys at age 10.4. Overall, African-American boys were more likely to start puberty earlier than white or Hispanic boys.”

When Europeans turned white – ” White European skin evolved relatively fast during the last ice age, specifically from 19,000 to 11,000 years ago…. These color traits—white skin and a diverse palette of hair and eye colors— are not adaptations to a cooler, less sunny climate. They are adaptations by early European women to intense mate competition, specifically a shortage of potential mates due to a low polygyny rate and a high death rate among young men.” — from peter frost.

couple of notes that i want to jot down (so i don’t forget them!) that i thought some of you might like to read, too. also, a bleg or two. i’ll start with the blegging to get it out of the way…
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how quickly can a population become clannish via close mating (ithiw†)?

consider the dutch woonwagenbewoners or “caravan dwellers.” these are a group of about 30,000 people in the netherlands who live (or lived up until recently) a gypsy-like existence, but who are not related to gypsies. if i’m reading the google translation of the dutch wikipedia article correctly, the woonwagenbewoners adopted their nomadic lifestyle around 1850 — six-ish generations ago(?) if we count a generation as twenty-five years in length.

nowadays there are reports of woonwagenbewoners engaging in family feuds — one woonwagenbewoner family versus another woonwagenbewoner family (original here — google translation):

“On the Joost de Momperstraat, a stone’s throw from the Doolplein, sometimes with nostalgia thought back to the good old days. It was very cozy in ‘camp’, almost a big family. That is quite different. Since the murder of an inmate two years ago, there is a feud between two families caravan, which has already resulted in wild shootings, assaults and threats. A family has moved to another place – after the father – but the sultry atmosphere remained.”

this doesn’t sound like a full-fledged “bloedwraak” (vendetta), but it does sound like the woonwagenbewoners (love that word!) aren’t opposed to a little feuding — which typically goes along with clannishness.

presumably the woonwagenbewoners have tended to marry amongst themselves down through the years (although i don’t know that for certain). my question is: did they start off from very outbred dutch populations, or more inbred ones? in other words, were they already clannish when they hit the road, or is that something that’s developed in the last 150 or so years?

we know, for instance, that some of the dutch population — in friesland and in coastal areas — wasn’t manorialized like the rest of the netherlands during the medieval period and so stuck to the old ways for longer, probably including close marriages, but definitely including clannishness and blood feuding.

so my bleg is: anybody know where the woonwagenbewoners came from? a particular region or regions of the netherlands perhaps? inquiring hbd chicks want to know! any info on this group would be appreciated. (^_^)

†ithiw = if that’s how it works.
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i had a post up before showing that father’s brother’s daughter (fbd) marriage — the kind favored by arabs and other muslims in that area of the world — amounts to more inbreeding than other forms of cousin marriage because it, in effect, leads to more double-first cousin marriage. well, here’s another reason the whole system leads to greater inbreeding — from The Structure of Parallel Cousin Marriage i learn that, in a society where fbd marriage is very common, your maternal first cousins wind up also being your paternal second cousins. (i tried to figure this out before, but it made my head spin.) this is because the family lineages in fbd marriage societies fold back in on themselves [pg. 22]:

“Since Bedouin society is based largely upon ties of kinship, each minimal-sized agnatic unit becomes virtually self contained and encysted. This can be shown in diagram B, which illustrates the convergence of father’s and mother’s lines in an ideal system of patrilateral parallel cousin marriage. Even the sporadic occurence of cross-cousin marriage fails to break the social isolation of the group. Diagram C shows a cross-cousin marriage within a system structured primarily by parallel cousin marriage; it can be seen that the cross cousins indicated are also second degree patrilateral parallel cousins, and we would venture to hypothesize that the Bedouin would interpret the relation in the latter way.”

“encysted.” good word. maybe one of these days i’ll diagram this.
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from Human Trafficking: A Global Perspective, we learn that human trafficking operations out of the balkans (oh god — not the balkans again!) are typically extended family/clan operations … and their victims frequently members of rival clans [pgs. 121-22]:

“Balkan traffickers operate within family groups. Therefore, although the organizations are controlled by men, there are cases in which operations in a particular country or region are controlled by female family members or by outsiders. For example, French police, through wiretaps, discovered that a sister of one of the French-based Balkan traffickers was operating a cell in Belgium. As the previous chapter pointed out, Balkan criminals maintain control across several neighboring countries. Belgian and Dutch women, as mentioned in Chapter 3, have been hired by Balkan clans to help run day-to-day operations because they arouse less police suspicion.”

and from earlier in this section:

“Female victims were often those whose families had died or women seized as part of blood revenge by one family against another.”

“Throughout its [the church’s] history reformers pointed to the ease with which the congregation continued to fall into earlier ways. At the domestic level the Church’s prohibitions and injunctions were frequently avoided, even disobeyed (Turlan 1957: 480). The actual extent of this disobedience is not known. Except for the registers of dispensations, which may themselves represent only the tip of the iceberg, the evidence for the practice of close marriage among the rural population is unlikely to achieve statistical reliability. But some accounts give a glimpse of the persistence of such forms of marriage. After the end of the eighteenth century the small isolated village of Pinon in the Auvergne gained fame as an example of ‘communal’ exploitation of the soil, with the different branches of one ‘family’ marrying among themselves. In 1787 the commune consisted of four such branches totalling 19 persons in all who married amongst themselves. Indeed, according to one source, the Pope had granted them a permanent dispensation against ‘cousinage’ (Dupin 1929: 47; Champeaux 1933: 248). They feared that out-marriage would ‘enfeeble their customary ways’, although one commentator, voicing an anxiety that runs as a continuing thread in Western European belief from the Dark Ages down to today, expressed the alternative view that the recent loss of population which they had experienced had been caused by this very practice of marrying kin.”

the amount of close marriages in pinon in the eighteenth century is not out of character for mountainous regions in europe, or elsewhere for that matter. (the unusual thing is when mountain folks outbreed a lot.) pinon is unlikely to be representative for france as a whole, however, although it could very well be representative for alpine and other mountainous regions of france.
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continuing from goody:

“More substantial evidence of close marriage is provided by Karnoouh’s study of French peasants in Lorraine in the last two centuries, a part of the country that had a very strong Catholic tradition. Nevertheless, claims the author, ‘they have always transgressed in very significant proportions, with or without the agreement of their bishops, the rules on the prohibited degrees of marriage laid down by the Church.’ Between 1810 and 1910 as many as 50 per cent of marriages went against those rules. Many were between first cousins, while others were between uncle and niece. The majority were between individuals born and resident in the same village (1971: 41). The last point is critical, for it suggests that the parties and their families had overlapping interests in matters other than marriage itself.”

a 50% consanguinity rate for lorraine between 1810 and 1910 sounds high, but may very well be correct. parts of southern italy, another devoutly roman catholic nation, had such rates in 1910-1914, so it’s certainly not completely out of character for europeans. however, the consanguineous marriage rate for catholics in alsace-lorraine in the 1870s was 0.997%. that’s quite a remarkable difference. i haven’t seen the original karnoouh article so i don’t know exactly where in lorraine he conducted his research. was it in the eastern mountainous region? i don’t know.
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more:

“The importance of cousin marriages in the recent past of the French village of Minot in Burgundy is noted by Verdier. ‘Before’, declared one mother, ‘of course people used to marry cousins, the marriages would be arranged when people gathered in the evenings, they used to talk about them.’ She hastened to add that today she would prefer her son to marry anyone other than a cousin and even a Black or Japanese for her daughter, but Verdier remarks that ‘the proportion of in-marriage and out-marriage remains remarkably stable’ (1979: 287-8).”

again, i haven’t seen the original work (by verdier) so i don’t know what the in- and out-marriage rates were for minot, nor exactly what time we’re talking about.
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“In a general survey of rural France in the nineteenth century, Segalen claims that in-marriage, both within the community and between relatives, actually increased over that period (1980: 19). But unlike the figures from Lorraine, the recorded rates are not exceptionally high; the records consist of dispensations registered with the Church, which represent only a proportion of the actual total of such unions. In Loir-et-Cher [in central france], such marriages formed about 3.5 per cent of the total, rising at times to 5 and 6 per cent; in Finistere [in brittany], the percentage was higher even at the beginning of the twentieth century.“

a 3.5 percent consanguineous marriage rate on average is more in line with what i would expect for central france in the nineteenth century. those numbers fit better with the alsace-lorraine data referenced above, not to mention the figures for france’s neighbors, england and spain, in the same time period. it also fits better with early twentieth century figures for france [h/t m.g.!] which max out at 3.5+ percent for roman catholics in certain regions of the country (click on map for LARGER view):

“Rates of in-marriage varied with the size of the village, the area in which it was located, and the freedom with which the dispensations were granted. Flandrin claims that in some mountain areas of France in the eighteenth century, the frequency was very high and ‘almost all marriages had to take place with dispensations from the impediments on the grounds of kinship’ (1979: 34). Such unions were often between cousins, some of whom had been brought up together because of the death of parents, a situation of which the registers of dispensations of marriage provide ‘innumerable examples’.”

i babbled something the other day about some groups maybe having a stronger sense of entitlement than others and wondered, if so, which ones those might be. so, i did a little digging around in the world values survey to see if i could find anything interesting.

i was looking for any question/s related to redistribution of wealth issues, and this is the closest one i could find in the last survey wave (2005-2008):

Many things may be desirable, but not all of them are essential characteristics of democracy. Please tell me for each of the following things how essential you think it is as a characteristic of democracy. Use this scale where 1 means *not at all an essential characteristic of democracy* and 10 means it definitely is *an essential characteristic of democracy*: Governments tax the rich and subsidize the poor.

i know, not the perfect question. but let’s see what the results looked like anyway (see also previous post). here are the percentages of respondents answering *10* to that question — governments taxing the rich and subsidizing the poor is *definitely* an essential characteristic of democracy:

the global average is 24.9%. all of the anglo nations (great britain, u.s., canada, australia) score well below that, with australia having the most redistributive inclinations at 12.5%. most of the other european countries also score below the global average, except for romania, germany and russia. the russian federation has got the highest score of all european nations at 44.5%. (i should’ve done a breakdown of the russian fed. by region, but i didn’t. maybe i’ll work on that.)

in asia, the thais, japanese, and taiwanese all score lower — way lower — than the global average. meanwhile, the chinese, south koreans, vietnamese and indonesians are over the global average.

you’d think that poorer countries would be more interested in redistribution of wealth than richer ones, but that doesn’t seem to be the case — at least not 100% of the time. one of the countries least interested in their democratic government (if they have one) redistributing wealth is rwanda. meanwhile, germany’s not poor, but they’re all about the redistribution of wealth apparently.

in the united states, whites scored lower than the u.s. average (6.6%) at 5.8%. the “others” (asians?) scored even lower at just 3%. hispanics and blacks both desire greater redistribution of wealth in america than whites (but you already knew that!):

mexicans back in mexico score on average 18.20% on the question, with white mexicans desiring the least redistribution of wealth, indios wanting the most, and mestizos somewhere in between:

i wanted to check out the numbers for great britain by race, but the sample sizes were too small (<50) for groups like blacks and south asians, so i checked out g.b. by region instead:

prolly can’t tell much from the london score since that is such a “vibrant” city. i’m not at all surprised to see the peripheral populations in g.b. being (like the arab cousin marriers) more interested in redistributing wealth: folks up north and the north west (cumbria’s in the north west), yorkshire and humberside. meanwhile, the english long-term outbreeders in the midlands and south east don’t want the wealth shared around. dunno what to make of the scots, though! i would’ve expected to see them with a high score. hmmmmm.

i also checked out the regional scores for china having in mind that i have the impression (impression) that cousin/endogamous marriage and clans have always been more frequent/stronger in southern china than in the north (which would fit the pathogen-consanguinity theory, btw). i found that there is a -0.47 correlation between latitude and desire for the redistribution of wealth in china — the further south you go, the more people want the wealth spread around (i.e. to them) [latitudes grabbed from geohack]:

lastly, india. i broke the india numbers down by region before, so this time i thought i’d look at them by religion:

a LOT of people in india are very enthusiastic about redistributing wealth. muslims and hindus the most (muslims more than hindus), christians and sikhs the least — christians least of all. recall that muslims in india have the highest rates of consanguineous marriage in india, while sikhs and christians have the lowest rates.

i’m using unbelievable in two senses of the word here: 1) that what run unz says cannot be believed, and 2) i can’t believe the things ron tries to get away with! (see what i did there? (~_^) )

an example of point 1:

ron said wrt the buj iq studies that appear in lynn and vanhanen’s IQ and the Wealth of Nations (tWoN):

“As it happens, all three of those near-100 IQ studies from 1979 are part of the 19 national samples contained in the Buj (1981) collection, which tend to be extreme outliers in all the various countries. Supposedly, the Buj IQ studies were totally non-representative and were generally conducted in capital cities, which might help explain why usually they often tend to be 10-15 points higher than other IQ studies from those same countries.”

i’ve highlighted the nations where the buj scores seem to be “extreme outliers,” i.e. in which the buj scores are 10-15 points different from other iq tests done in those countries, and I only find three (3) examples: ghana, poland and portugal. if i were feeling generous, i might throw in ireland, too, with a nine (9) point difference. that’s hardly what i’d call “often.” quite the opposite — in the vast majority of the cases, the buj scores align very nicely with other test scores.

i can’t see how ron unz couldn’t have been aware of this since he’s apparently spent so much time combing through the lynn and vanhanen data. either he forgot what was really in tWoN, or … i dunno … he’s being economical with the truth? whatever the case — and given all the other “careless errors” he’s made with the data — ron is…

unbelievable.
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an example of point 2:

wrt his original data collection from the gss on how rural or urban different white american ethnic groups are, ron said:

“As for my GSS calculation, I just used RACE=WHITE, ETHNIC, and WORDSUM. My ethnic urban/rural estimate substituted RES16 for WORDSUM, and I considered Country+Farm as being ‘rural’ while ‘City+Suburb+Big City’ was considered urban. The Italians, Irish, Greeks, and Yugoslavs come out heavily urban, the Dutch heavily rural, and the Germans somewhat rural.”

i should’ve paid more attention to this at the time, ’cause now just the other day, dan pointed out (thanks, dan!) that ron just SKIPPED a whole gss category of rural/urban folks, namely the small town folks [quote from here]:

“My analysis only focused on the City/Suburb/Farm categories (leaving out e.g. small towns), since those seemed to provide the sharpest sign of some sort of surprising Rural/Urban Divide.”

why would you leave out a WHOLE CATEGORY OF THE DATA?

perhaps that’s the reason that, unlike ron, i found that german-americans are not significantly more rural than other white american ethnic groups. ’cause i used ALL the data available in the gss.

who knows what else is “not quite right” with ron’s data points given his selective use of them (plenty examples of which have already been pointed out many, many times over in the comments here on this blog — thanks to everyone who’s drawn attention to these little problems in ron’s methodology!)?

unbelievable.
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update 08/12: i’m gonna just go ahead and add one more point — the constantly shifting sands of ron’s argument.

in my first post about ron’s iq theory, i said that one point that needed to be taken into account is exactly who are taking the iq or pisa or whatever tests. i pointed out that:

“today’s french’ population includes ca. 19% (11.8M) foreign born immigrants or their direct descendants, about one-third (4M) of whom are from north africa. and the u.k. had 7.86% minorities as of the 2001 census (and it’s well known that those rates have gone up since then)…. it’s very possible that the average pisa/iq scores of ethnic french or british kids are higher than their current national scores….

“you don’t think the immigrants in these countries could bring down the pisa scores? think again. the irish have actually experienced this even with the comparatively small number of immigrants they have….” [see the previous post for the full example.]

ron dismissed that the presence of large numbers of immigrants could have any significant effect on iq/pisa scores in france or britain — or anywhere, i guess:

“You argue this might be explained because 20% of France’s population were low-IQ minorities, and the 8% of Britain’s population fell in the same category. Does this make any sense? Could a British population which was 92% high-IQ and 8% low-IQ really have the same average academic performance as an Irish population which was 100% low-IQ?”

now, in the comment thread of this very post (!) — just down there ↓ — ron says:

“The fifth widest gap is the 8.5 spread for France, with the *low* score being from Buj (but note that by 1979 France’s capital city of Paris already contained a substantial population of impoverished African and North African immigrants).”

!?!?!?!?!?!

well, which is it?! can a good-sized population of immigrants affect iq scores or not?? it’s hard to tell when you’re discussing a problem with ron unz. shifting sands, shifting sands.

here’s another example of this: ron’s original argument, if you’ll recall (and iirc), involved the “facts” that british-americans and dutch-americans are both very rural groups and that they have, comparatively, low iqs. when it was made clear to him that british-americans don’t have comparatively low iqs, he suddenly changed his tune:

“A much better example I should have used instead were German-Americans, who are significantly more rural than the white American average….”

nick says: “The Balkans had the 7th cousin law, that forbid them to marry anyone closer than the 7th cousin.”

i did a little googling on that and found what i think will probably prove to be a general pattern for balkan populations: a ban on marrying in the patriline, but marrying on the mother’s side is ok and even preferred. so the seventh-cousin law that nick is referring to relates only to paternal cousins.

this is just a preliminary look at the mating patterns in the balkans, btw. i need to do a lot more research on this.

regarding the macedonian slavs: “The genealogical reckoning is primarily agnatic [i.e. through the male line – h. chick]. Kinship terminology distinguishes father’s brother (stric) from the mother’s brother (ujak), as well as using a special word to indicate sister’s or daughter’s husband (zet) and a woman married to a set of brothers (jetrva). On the agnatic side, marriage is forbidden up to the ninth generation, while the matrilineal first cousins could be regarded as possible mates if it was not for the canonical prohibition.“

that’s the christian church’s ban on cousin marriage. but otherwise, marriage to matrilineal relatives is ok — and macedonian slavs would’ve approved of matrilineal first cousin marriage if it wasn’t for their church.

regarding the bosnian muslims, bringa reports (pg. 146) that “there is a preference for marrying agnatic affines.” agnatic refers to the paternal line — so your father and your paternal grandfather and all your paternal aunts and uncles, etc. affines are in-laws. so there is a preference amongst bosnian muslims to marry their in-laws connected to the father’s side of the family.

the most obvious members of that group would simply be one’s maternal relatives, i.e. your father’s in-laws (see?). but agnatic affines could also include, for instance, your paternal uncle’s wife’s relatives.

i know — it all gets kinda complicated. the important thing, though, is it’s all a sort of endogamous mating.

“A brief description of Albanian society is required here. Albanians are divided into two language or dialect groups, the Gheg and the Tosk, with the Tosk dominating in southern Albania and the Gheg in northern Albania and the highlands (the division is roughly at the Shkumbi river). The Albanians in Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia are Ghegs (with some exceptions in southern Macedonia). Traditional structures, tribal or clan-based, as well as village community-based forms of social organisation remained important among the Albanian population in Kosovo throughout the Yugoslav period. There are notable elements of continuity in traditional loyalty structure and customary law (including the practice of blood feud). The terms ‘tribe’ and ‘clan’ are contested, but we may instead use the Albanian terms. The Albanian term ‘fis’ refers to a large groups which claim descent from one common male ancestor. Each fis is divided into sub-branches. Marriage within the same fis (based on the male line) is considered incestuous even if the ‘actual’ relationship is, say, nine or ten generations back (which does not apply on the maternal side).[12] In Kosovo there are about thirteen fises. A smaller group which traditionally has existed within the fis is a brotherhood or ‘vellazeri’, which is similar to the Balkan form of extended family, the ‘Zadruga’, but differs from it, for example, in that there was not a common budget. A ‘mehala’ is another term for a subgroup consisting of a number of closely related houses. A house, or a ‘shpi’ could itself consist of an extended family — something still existing in Kosovo although they have declined considerably during the Yugoslav period…. It should be noted that within the same fis some members can be Muslim and other Catholic. Among the Albanians there are Catholics, Muslims and Orthodox. The Orthodox prevail in south Albania (among the Tosk), whereas Kosovo is predominantly Muslim….

“The traditional Albanian village consisted of the (often fortified) houses (kulle) of the extended families, but had no public spaces. There were no cafes or inns, or public buildings of any kind. All matters relating to society, or social life, were discussed inside the family houses, and the house was thereby of particular importance in Albanian cultural life…. In contrast to the pattern in northwestern Europe, for example, there were no intermediary associations or public spheres between the individual, or family, and the state and hence nothing resembling what has been called ‘civil society’ in the usage of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century thinkers. Indeed there was neither the social structure nor social infrastructure or type of economy for such an analytical term as ‘civil society’ to be applied; social life was shaped by the extended family (with its house), the clan and the village, and there was no social organisation beyond the extended family apart from the clan. All legal matters were strictly regulated in customary law and applied by the clans, or mediated in meetings by the elders (kuvend)….

“The Albanians … had no aspirations to an Albanian state before the twentieth century, but were quite content with remaining inside the Ottoman state. Although there may have been a growing Albanian identity, beyond the fis, especially in the nineteenth century, there was not really any expression of Albanian nationalism. Several factors made expressions of nationhood unlikely. There were disputes between clans, and the Albanians did not share a single religion, but were divided between Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism. The lifestyles of, for example, the Tosk in the south or in the coastal trading ports and the Gheg of the highlands were quite different.

“[12] As noted by Edith Durham, the Catholic Church prohibited marriage to the sixth degree, but on the maternal side much closer relatives might enter marriage. See Durham (1909: 22); The practice of prohibiting marriage within the fis remains today.”

“German-Americans … are significantly more rural than the white American average”

… is untrue. they are not. the white american average of “ruralness” is 27% (according to the nesstar gss data). thirty-three percent (33%) of german-americans live in rural areas. that’s just a six point difference from the average. it’s higher than average, but not a LOT. meanwhile, 41% of white american-americans (“american only”) live in rural areas. that’s significantly more than the white american average. (only ca. 10% of italian- and greek-americans live in rural areas.)

today i took a look at the sda gss data (no, apparently i don’t have a life). here’s a screenshot of my search parameters so you can see what the h*ck i did (click on image for LARGER view):

the results are — not all that different from yesterday’s results (click on image for LARGER view — should open in a new tab/window — you might have to click on it there to get it to be full-sized):

dutch-americans are, indeed, very rural. and italian- and greek- and yugoslav-americans are all very urban. german-americans are quite rural, but again not much more than anglo-, scots- or even irish-americans. and american-americans are more rural than german-americans.

for some of the groups, i added to the chart the iq scores that the awesome epigone calculated based on the gss wordsum test results. as the a.e. said:

“Contrary to Unz’ assertion, those of English or Welsh descent outscore Italians, Irish, Greeks, and Slavs, though the Dutch do not.”

nor do the germans.

ron’s idea is that urban living produces a sort-of super-flynn effect — at least for peoples of european stock. so you’d think that there ought to be a positive correlation between high average iqs for white americans and urban living — the more urban a group, the higher the iq, right?

well, i can’t find any such correlation. i get a correlation of precisely zip for white american urban-ness and high iq. below is a little chart showing that absent correlation. the x-axis represents my “rural-urban index” (“difference %rural-%urban” from my table above) — more urban is to the left, more rural is to the right. the y-axis represents the awesome epigone’s iq scores. as bob would say, that’s a scatter plot:

several of the highest white american iqs are held by rural groups: swiss-americans (103.6 – 42% rural), norwegian-americans (102.1 – 38% rural), danish-americans (102.6 – 32% rural), and anglo-americans (102.4 – 29% rural). the swiss and norwegians started off rural back in europe and stayed pretty rural in the u.s. — more so than the germans — but they’re awfully smart in the u.s. why don’t they have low average iqs? the danish- and anglo-americans started off pretty urban back in europe, but now they’re rural in the u.s., but they’re smart, too. what is going on?

meanwhile, white puerto ricans are some of the most urban (92% urban) of all these groups and their iq is only 89.9. and whites from mexico, too — very urban (80% urban) — but with an average iq of 87.7.